Scheduling Teams meetings in Outlook

[Justin Richter]

Hi there

Our educators are used to using Outlook to schedule meetings with staff and learners.

Since we've all adopted Teams, they still want to be able to schedule Team meetings using Outlook.

In the Outlook Calendar there is a "New Teams Meeting" feature which we're using but the following is an issue,

Unable to select the Office 365 group (Team) as a Required recipient.

Work-around is to get the email address of the General Channel that belongs to the Team they are trying to schedule with.

The issue with this is that the new meeting then arrives as an email post in the Team channel without any time or date details of the actual meeting and only a  Join Teams Meeting hyperlink.

Is there a better way we should be doing this?

Our Teachers want to be able to schedule lessons in advance with the learners.

Please find attached my documentation on the process.

Kind regards

[#2]

Hi,

Currently there are multiple options to schedule the teams meeting.

1. Scheduling the meeting via outlook and inviting each team member as an Individual.

2. Scheduling the Team Meeting from the Teams Client Itself wherein you can go to the Channel and schedule the meeting?

For your Teachers Benefits
1. Schedule the Teams Meeting using the Outlook and include the specific channel name while scheduling the meeting that should add the details of the Timing in the Channel instead of the Complete invite with the time and date.

With Regards,
Satish U

[#3]

Hi Justin,

Is there a reason you are going back to Outlook? As long as your mailboxes are on O365, you should be able to access your calendar directly from Teams. You could do any of the following

1) Populate the student names on the required attendees portion under Calendar, New Meeting
2) From the Calendar. Click on meet now, join now, copy link, create a normal invitation via Outlook, paste the join URL Info
3) Same steps as 1 but then Choose the channel you want to meet under and all the members in the channel automatically get invited and the invitation is present on the channel chat

You can also just convert your existing Outlook meetings into teams meetings. As an educator myself, I know that not one size fits all so I presented multiple options and folks choose what works best for them. Also, not sure if you've been creating class teams by hand, you might want to look at SDS. Fairly straight forward but does a lot of the roster creation work for you.

Best,
Bp

[#4]

@RealTime_M365 

Hi Satish

Thank you for your reply.

Unfortunately using Outlook to schedule a meeting  we are unable to add a Teams channel as a required recipient.

Please see attached image for a comparison of our Outlook options vs Teams Calendar options.

Kind regards

[#5]

@bipinprakash 

Hi BP

Thank you for your reply.

Our organisation will continue to use Outlook as its core to our business practice. Teams has been a direct result of the COVID-19 circumstances to facilitate teaching and learning.

We are able to access our calendars via teams but one would think that the functionality to schedule a meeting with a channel would be inherited by Outlook as they're both running off Exchange Online. perhaps Microsoft is rolling out this feature in their road map.

We are SDS synced :) 

Manually adding each learner as a recipient in Outlook is too labor intensive, reason for us using the Team Channel Email address instead. 

I will test your suggestions 2 and 3  to see if I am able to create a more streamlined process for them.

Thank you

[#6]

Hi @Justin Richter

I got your point. Apologies for the confusion. This is by design of the Microsoft Teams Application and the Microsoft Teams Meeting. 

With Regards,

Satish U  

[#7]

Spoiler

I have the same question: I want to schedule meetings in Outlook and choose a channel from Outlook. I read that this was rolled out, but I don't see it in my Outlook, and I'm not sure if this is something that has to be turned on at the Admin level?

[#8]

Hello,

I haven't see the feature released out yet for the Outlook. Can you please share the Article for the reference.

With Regards,
Satish U